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Concept
Primitive communism
Summary
Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept (often credited to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), that describes hunter-gatherer societies as traditionally being based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership. A primary inspiration for both Marx and Engels were Lewis H. Morgan's descriptions of "communism in living" as practised by the Haudenosaunee of North America. In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation.
The original idea of primitive communism is rooted in the idea of the noble savage present in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the early anthropological work of Morgan and Ely S. Parker. Engels was the first to write about primitive communism in detail, with the 1884 publication of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels categorised primitive communist societies into two phases: the "wild" (hunter-gatherer) phase that lacked permanent superstructure and had close relationships with the natural world, and the "barbarian" phase which held a superstructure like that of the ancient Germanic populations beyond the borders of the Roman Empire and the Indigenous peoples of North America before colonisation by Europeans, being intra-communally egalitarian and matrilineal within the community.
Marx and Engels used the term more broadly than Marxists did later, and applied it not only to hunter-gatherers but also to some communities that engaged in subsistence agriculture. There is also no agreement among later scholars, including Marxists, on the historical extent, or longevity, of primitive communism. Marx and Engels also noted how capitalist accumulation latched itself onto social organizations of primitive communism.
Official source
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